SRE Weekly Issue #113

The best kind of engineer is one that understands not only their specialty, but at least something about the fields adjacent to theirs. The empathy this confers allows one to work incredibly effectively across the company. For SREs, this is even more important.

[…] many of us are finding that the most valuable skill sets sit at the intersection of two or more disciplines.

Charity Majors — Honeycomb

GitLab held a session about recognizing and preventing burnout at their recent employee summit. They share the best tips in this article, and true to their radically open culture, they also added what they learned to their employee handbook, which is publicly available.

Clement Ho — GitLab

Here’s a post-analysis for a Travis CI incident early last year. Despite a couple of easy targets that could have been labelled as “root cause”, they instead skillfully laid out all of the contributing factors and left it at that.

Travis CI

What indeed? The same thing, just organized differently. There’s a lot of great analysis here about how ops roles can adapt to a serverless infrastructure, and how teams can best make use of ops folks.

Tom McLaughlin — ServerlessOps

Charity Majors wants you to look forward to on-call. This superb write-up of her recent conference talk explains why folks should think of on-call as an enjoyable privilege and how to shape your on-call to get there.

Jennifer Riggins

The Canary Analysis Service is Google’s internal tool that automatically analyzes canary runs and decides whether performance has been negatively impacted. My favorite section is the Lessons Learned.

Štěpán Davidovič with Betsy Beyer — ACM Queue